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The painful truth has already been acknowledged.

Monolingual websites don’t allow you to speak to your foreign buyers in their native language.

They don’t allow you to compete for search engine ranking in multiple languages.

You are fed up with the limitations of your monolingual website and want to make it multilingual.

But where to start? How to identify your top markets and consequently languages you should target.

Where to find a dependable translation agency or freelancer. And finally, how to have at least an approximate understanding of your website translation budget.

When similar questions popped up in your mind, you perhaps first searched for answers on Google.

Yes, many blogs write on website translation services costs but they are mainly agencies who just describe their services.

Our post will give you a comprehensive understanding not only about costs but also the whole website translation process. In the end, you will know

• how to do budget planning,
• what translation service to choose,
• what tips to follow to save money but have all your top pages in front of your target audience.

Looking for a reliable tool to find out how many words you have on your website, or maybe on a specific page only?

Let's first understand what you need it for.

While you might need a word counter for a variety of reasons, one of the most common scenarios when you will need it is when translating your website.

Why? It's simple: just like salespeople are paid based on the deals they close, the translators are paid based on the number of words or pages they translate.

There are several online tools you can use to find the number of words your website has, and some of them are from translation agencies and even automatic translation tools.

Yes, you heard it right, even with some automatic website translation services, you should check the number of words you are going to translate, as they will offer different plans based on the word count on your page or the whole website. In other words, they will charge you money per word just like real translators do.

Sure it can be unpleasant since it means the bigger your website will grow, the more money you are going to spend on the translation. You will even have to upgrade the translation service every time you add a few lines to a page or a few pages to a website.

Things can go even worse when the translation providers stop the entire service and refuse to even give you the translation for the less text that you had earlier.

So, what to do?

To all Google Language Translator Users: Welcome to GTranslate!

As the founder of Google Language Translator Rob Myrick announced nearly a week ago, Google Language Translator is now a part of GTranslate family. Before talking about what this basically means for you, let's briefly describe what are the core differences and similarities of two plugins.

Google Language Translator and GTranslate

Both are multilingual plugins which help to instantly make your websites multilingual and both are easy to install and use.

Google Language Translator works like GTranslate's free plan. They both provide on-fly translation of your website through Google's machine translation: the website is being translated only when your visitor selects a language. The only difference here is in the design and default options to post Language Selectors on your website.

When people say "translation services", they usually imply the services provided by professional translators. For example, when they say "professional website translation", they mean that a translator is going to translate the website content into a language manually. Translators usually perform translations in 1 or 2 languages. Sometimes, if you are lucky enough, you will get a translation into several languages too. But never into a dozen languages.

So, if you want to translate a website into say 20 languages, you might need to hire 5-6 translators if not more. Is this going to cost you a lot of money? It definitely is!

Thanks to the technology, there are automatic translation tools out there on the web which you can use to translate pretty much anything posted anywhere. However, automatic translation tools are not always perfect. While automatic translation continues to improve day by day, it is still unable to reach perfect levels of accuracy, and it also lacks a natural feel. So, will it replace natural translation one day? It has all the chances to do so.